Chapter 252: All Bets Are Off
Former Prime Commander Zalanth was paying as close attention to the events that were taking place elsewhere in the galaxy as anyone. In spite of her relatively high expectations for the Humans of Earth, the scenes that played out on desolate battlefields managed to leave her shell-shocked.
She rubbed the outside of her pale blue arms in a desperate bid for self-comfort, feeling the thin faded scars that crossed her skin through calloused hands. She tried to use the texture of her skin as a device to ground her thoughts, but the stress she was experiencing wasn’t so easily soothed. It was a bit like learning of the depths of space for the first time: difficult to understand and even more difficult to accept.
Many in the galactic community never had to struggle with such a revelation even a single time. They lived in isolated settlements, born into their faction, believing whatever they were told by their elders. Maybe the elders instructed them that they were the center of the universe, or they were the favored people of the galaxy, but no matter what, the extent of the galactic community was always a challenging acknowledgment if it came at all.
Zalanth felt pity for herself for being forced to deal with such a significant disclosure twice in her lifetime. She was afraid she would never restore the blissful ignorance that had given her unblemished confidence in their continued existence. Losing confidence in the defining rules and structures of the system was proving to be unsettling, to say the least. She shivered as she touched upon the sore spot in her thoughts.
There was an extra complication that made her uniquely affected by it all. Even though she was a mere warrior, a tool of her former faction, not expected to think too much outside of her own militaristic area of expertise, it seemed like she was the only one who had an inkling of what was really happening. Based on her experience and credentials, Zalanth was among the last people that should have been deducing intangible threats to the bedrock of the community.
Assessing combat effectiveness should have been as far as she ever went when it came to evaluating these battles, but what she saw as a tear in the carefully crafted fabric of their reality was impossible to overlook. The easy dismissals of what she was observing were disconcerting and made her feel like she was growing unhinged. That there weren’t public outcries mirroring her unease riddled her with doubt and confusion, but she couldn’t deny her judgment.
Despite all of the experts and casual observers who spent their time noting the oddities of the galactic community, she appeared to be the only one recognizing the alarm bells that were going off. The events surrounding the planet Earth were a revelation. Humans weren’t just a curiosity, they were a disruption. She wanted to grab someone and shout in their face that they should be terrified! If they managed to break this many rules in this short of a time, imagine what would happen if they were allowed to fester.
She was personally connected to the species of newcomers by pure happenstance and it only added to her uneasiness. In fact, she wasn’t simply connected to the events that were taking place, she was directly benefiting from the outcomes. There was this sense building within her chest that she hadn’t earned the fortune that was being bestowed upon her, and more importantly, it felt like there would be a severe cost extracted by humans, one way or another. Who or what would pay or how wasn't yet clear to her, but she thought it might come from everyone in the galactic community and everything that constituted their way of life.
She thought she had some sort of responsibility to do something, to warn someone. They needed to prepare themselves for change, to resist, to be ready for anything, but who would listen to the disgraced former Prime Commander? There was no one. Her previous subordinates would assume she had lost her mind after being exiled, and that was if they would even hear her out in the first place. Everyone else was a stranger. There were no friends in the community. The feeling of helplessness was crippling and only served to further verify her isolation.
She cycled through battle recordings, trying to decide which to review before settling on the newest one, as if she had to keep watching, and clenched her fists. She had viewed more than a thousand battles on her own, but she couldn’t look away.
The scariest part of all was that she didn’t think her assessment of the new faction should or would be unique. Once the peculiarities of humans were exposed more broadly, that they would potentially shake the foundations of normality, there would be an opposing reaction. Those that stood to lose would almost certainly be unhappy, and that would be anyone satisfied with the status quo or fearing of the unknown. In the galactic community, that was basically everyone. Humans would be even more isolated than she was, and what would they do when they were forced into a corner? She couldn’t imagine a scenario where they would accept their place. She need only watch the total annihilation of yet another army for proof.
There wouldn’t be many that had fallen so far from grace that they would both be cognizant of the current careful balance in the galaxy and low enough within it to embrace the chaos that humans represented. Humans would find no allies waiting for them, offering guidance or solidarity. The only ones to look at humans favorably would have to be the rubbish of the galaxy, tossed away after being used up, the weaklings who had been torn from their position in the hierarchies, and the pawns of the more powerful who were capable of dreaming of a different existence. Who else would cheer for havoc bringers?